


First of May

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: 1920s, 1930s, Alternate Universe, Circus, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-02
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-07 05:39:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a wild-hare story that spun from an innocent Bethany/Merrill prompt for femslash february. for afragmentcastadrift on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First of May

An aversion to looking back, and work as broad and dirty as a pachyderm’s behind.  
  
These are common traits in circus folk, because their train is a single-minded projectile; A slow bullet launched before an audience to kill a darling life.  They make it up as they go, everything that doesn’t fit, everything wasteful, left on the ground and forgotten before the morning’s coal gets shoveled into the belly of the beast.   
  
And they go, waving ‘so long’ to a countryside of yellow hills and people dimmed around the eyes.  
  
Bethany likes Merrill ‘cause all she does is look behind her.  
  
Merrill likes Bethany ‘cause she’s strong as a foal between her thighs.  
  
They sleep in hammocks, in the first stall of the horse car, and with her eyes closed the train is a barn set to sea. All sway and creak, and the darksweet reek of hay and shit and dusty hides. Merrill talks in her sleep about a mama who wasn’t one.    
  
Over the top of their stall, Bethany watches the zebra’s ears flick, brushbristle mane twitching, and she wonders what Merrill’s feet feel like on his back when he runs.  Cramped circles dragged into sawdust by black hooves that shouldn’t know a shoe, but do.  
  
“Give it, come on.”  
  
Bethany looks across the way, finding Merrill’s arm stretched out, palm up. The lantern’s off but she can still see the tattoos. They grow from shadow.  Bethany takes her hand.  
  
“S’no good to be asleep when you’re awake, you know,” says Merrill.  
  
“Hours to go, still,” says Bethany, and pulls gently to start them rocking. And she sighs around the heft of the city they haven’t seen yet over the iron-strap trail. “Missoula. Hell.”  
  
“Was it me kept you up?”  
  
“Yes and no,” she replies, and turns out her smile to Merrill. “Keep me better’n most.”  
  
She’d think about fire if it weren’t for Merrill. She’d think about no rain and Da’s thinning gums, his wasted chest. Fingers on her wrist press the pulse, the hammocks swing like a couple of trapezes, and their arms just a limp chain in the dark.  
  
“My brother had a tattoo,” Bethany murmurs.  
  
“Did he?”  
  
“Ayuh. Shape of a mythical beast.” And a plough’s not myth, but in Beth’s dreams it’s got a beak and wings and thirst. Enough to crush him all the same.  
  
“Mare told me all tattoos come from treachery of a sort,” says Merrill, stretching her legs out of the blanket.  The ink flows there, too, swinging. “It starts with love and ends with pain.”  
  
“Ever the same,” Bethany replies.  
  
“True.”  Merrill’s throat is bottomless with stories, slick with her lamp-oil voice to spark them.  “She said the first ink was part blood, mixed with magic. A witch of a man, powerful but kind, conjured up an ink that made art on its own. Soon as quill touched paper, out dripped daring stories and dancin’ pictures.”  
  
“What for?”  
  
“To write to his sweetie across the sea,” Merrill says with a squeeze, rocking them deeper in the stall. She pulls with her smile and her map’s-end fingers. “So she’d know his pinin’ was truthful, even on paper.”  
  
“Oh, that’s lovely,” says Bethany.  
  
“Anyway, he had a brother,” Merrill continues, “Envious sort, just green with it from the day they were born.” She rubs her thighs where a pair of anchors lay in the skin.  Where Beth knows the ache of a hard ride and a long pose.  
  
“Uh oh,” she says, blinking.  
  
“The brother thieves this precious ink in the black of night, and aims to make a fortune on publishing or painting,” says Merrill, tracing the splash of waves on her knee. “He scratches out page after page but it’s no good. The ink just slides into the shape of the truth, so bare he can’t stand to look at it.”    
  
Her voice twists low, under the rattle of the rails and she says, “It makes him so sorry he cries, fat ol’ tears right on top of the ugly mess he’s drawn. In his shamefulness, know what he does?”  
  
“What?” Bethany squeezes her hand.  
  
“Swallows it up,” Merrill replies, all big eyes and splayed fingers with a kid’s disgusted grin. “Just gulps down the ink like it was castor oil.”  
  
“Ick.” Bethany would giggle if not for the hush inside her cheeks, over her tongue. Oil on a bent teaspoon and Ma’s cooing just beyond.  
  
“And lies when he’s caught, too, staring fearful up into his brother’s magic-wild eyes,” says Merrill, shifting in her hammock, and spinning the stolen ink story to its sorrowful end, “So the wizard calls on his ink, sings it up through the blood because he can. Because it’s his own in more ways than one. And the ink pushes itself up through the brother’s skin, seeking its master and carving its tale in a thousand treacherous pictures across his body.”  
  
Merrill sighs in the finale, puffing out her painted cheek, and says, “The first tattoo, born of woe.”  
  
After a fashion, Bethany sits up and the horses whicker through the car.  
  
“It makes no sense. Why’d he swallow it?”  
  
“Hell if I know, it’s just a story, Beth. Making sense ain’t its purpose.”  Merrill flaps her hand.  There’s a shudder of moonlight working through slats, so Bethany can see her face. How it’s open when so much is shuttered and gone.  
  
It can’t be easy to double-bill, a sideshow and a center ring gal, but Bethany’s watched Merrill command both tents in a turnaway. Her body’s a marvel, and it costs six bits to see it behind a curtain, ten to watch it Roman Ride the salt sheened horses ‘round and ‘round; easy as a gull winging over shore-breakers made of muscle and heat.  
  
Bethany eases out of her hammock, bare feet sticky on the hay ‘cause she’s hotter than when she woke.  
  
“S’pose you’re right about that,” she says, reaching out. “Most of the world’s true things are hardly to be believed.”  
  
They kiss in the dark that isn’t so deep as others she’s known, Merrill’s breath going short against her teeth, and Beth’s hands are surer than the month of poor starts suffered at the edge of the spotlight.  
  
“Mmm. Push me down in the straw, darlin,” Merrill whispers, green eyes full of Bethany and nothing else.  
  
“Not sleepy after all?” Beth asks, toes firm on the car’s jerking floor. “I can do that.”  
  
She’s a show Bethany knows the history of, suckling the mermaid over Merrill’s breast, but it’s not knives she dodges in the ballyhoo, it’s needles. The ones that pin her down and don’t offer their color.  
  
“Ball of sunshine, you are,” says Merrill when the hammock’s swaying over their bodies instead of under them, and there’s happy twitching beneath Bethany’s lips.  
  
“Open up,” she says, “dawn’s comin’.”


End file.
